I am the one responsible for the program for our next Poets’ Forum meeting, which is on the calendar for this Saturday, Nov. 19, 11 a.m., at the Beverly Public Library. So, I have decided to emphasize imagery, and to do so by using a favorite poet of mine, Peter Everwine.

I have shared his “Aubade in Autumn” in a prior post. Few of us are familiar with him, I think. He actually taught with Philip Levine at Fresno State and has won many poetry awards, including a Pushcart Prize, a Lamont Poetry prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and more. Jeanette had given a wonderful program on Levine at our last meeting, so it seems appropriate to talk about his contemporary, another under-appreciated but very gifted poet.

I hope you can join us!

In closing, I will leave you with another of Everwine’s poems:

Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed

and the pear tree at my window darkened,

I put down my book and stood at the open door,

the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,

a smell of wet clay in the wind.

Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,

half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain

drummed against our tent, I heard

for the first time a loon’s sudden wail

drifting across that remote lake—

a loneliness like no other,

though what I heard as inconsolable

may have been only the sound of something

untamed and nameless

singing itself to the wilderness around it

and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father

and of good companions gone

into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain

and the soft lapping of water, and did not know

whether it was grief or joy or something other

that surged against my heart

and held me listening there so long and late.